Annals of Industry: Children’s Tylenol Still Off the Market

way back in springtime about how McNeil Consumer Healthcare, aka Johnson & Johnson, was having a little trouble with some of its children’s medications? The company voluntarily recalled its full infant and children’s lines of liquid Tylenol and Motrin, strictly as a precautionary measure, despite no evidence of “adverse medical events,” because—well, because the drugs were tainted with foreign matter, their ingredients were substandard, and the company didn’t really know

Anyway, all that was months and months ago. Except Johnson & Johnson still hasn’t finished working out how to bring non-tainted versions of the drugs back to the market. The Fort Washington, Pennsylvania,

So preschool illness season is here, and Tylenol and Motrin’s former space in the drugstore children’s-liquids section still belongs to drugstore-brand acetaminophen and ibuprofen. “[W]e don’t anticipate having product until spring 2011,”

of more Fort Washington products, “including about four million packages of Children’s Benadryl allergy tablets and 800,000 bottles of junior-strength Motrin caplets.”

The good news is, if you forgot to do anything about the recall when it happened, and now your kid has a fever and the sniffles, there’s nothing to be confused or unsure about. If you have any liquid children’s or infant